Huawei's SingleRAN Pro provides an efficient single-vendor approach, but MNOs may resist in the 5G era

"Many MNOs employ a multi-vendor RAN strategy, not just for cost-cutting reasons, but also to avoid single-vendor lock-in; however, the latter is encouraged by Huawei through its new SingleRAN Pro solution."

Huawei held its annual global analyst summit in Shenzhen, China in April 2018; it announced its 5G-oriented SingleRAN Pro solution on the eve of the summit. SingleRAN Pro is an update to the 2008 SingleRAN product launched in the early days of LTE. The telecom industry’s current market situation is, however, quite different to that of 10 years ago, and the consolidation of various generations of radio access technologies (RATs) into a single platform is just one of the concerns faced by mobile network operators (MNOs). While SingleRAN Pro addresses some of the fundamental technology concerns from MNOs, such as spectral efficiency, cloud-RAN and network optimisation, it does not allay important business concerns regarding the upcoming challenges of deploying 5G in an existing multi-vendor RAN architecture environment.